I Work Every Single Sunday

Nine years, four employers, three cities, and the same fact.

It is not one contract. That is the thing that has taken her a while to see and that makes it feel less like circumstance and more like a joke somebody is telling. It has been a different job every time and the pattern has followed her: the care home, then the hotel, then the depot with the weekend rate, and now the ward, where she is a band five and where Sundays are simply what she does.

She has worked out, roughly, that she has been in a Sunday service eleven times in nine years, all of them at other people's things. Two weddings, six baptisms of other people's children, one funeral, and two Christmas services when the schedule fell right.

She is thirty-six.

She prays constantly and badly, which is her own description. She reads on her phone at four in the morning on a night shift in a corridor with one light on. She has led somebody to the Lord in a parking lot at seven twenty in the morning, which she has never told anybody, and which she thinks about more often than almost anything else in her life.

And the thing she has never done, and has never been able to arrange, and has slowly stopped bringing up even with herself, is the one that everybody else seems to do on a Sunday morning in a room.

She asked once. Six years ago. A woman at the hotel church, the one she went to on the two Christmases, said something warm and general about "we usually do those in the summer," and she nodded and never brought it up again, and she does not blame that woman even slightly.

Here is where it has got to. She no longer thinks about it as something that has not been arranged. She thinks about it as something that is for people whose weeks have Sundays in them.

The week does not have jurisdiction

I want to say the plain thing at the start, because I think it will take a weight off before anything else can work.

A shift pattern has never had authority over anything God does.

You know that. But look at what has quietly happened: nine years of the same fact, across four employers, has stopped feeling like circumstance and started feeling like a category. And once it is a category, it is not about a schedule any more. It is about what kind of person you are, and that is where the damage sits.

So let me put underneath you what is actually true, and notice the posture God takes in it.

Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.Isaiah 41:10

Read the physical picture. Uphold thee with the right hand. That is not a distant blessing. It is a hand under somebody, taking their weight, and the hand is described as belonging to His righteousness rather than to hers.

And notice the doubling. Yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee. The repetition is there because the person being addressed is not expected to believe it the first time.

You are upheld by the right hand of God's righteousness, in a corridor at four in the morning with one light on, and that is not encouragement for a woman on a schedule, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the nine years rather than on a verse you have probably read on your phone at three in the morning.

Now let me say something about the parking lot at seven twenty.

You led somebody to the Lord in a parking lot at seven twenty in the morning and you have never told anybody.

I want to stop there for a second, because you slid past it in about eleven words and it is the most significant sentence in your account.

You have been used by God in a way most people in most Sunday rooms have never once been used. Scripture puts the upholding in God's own hand, and the Spirit of God is the one who was in that parking lot, and He did not need a service, a building, a Sunday, or a free morning to do it.

I want to be careful about the woman at the hotel church, because she is the only person in this account who could be made into a villain and she does not deserve it.

She said something warm and general about the summer. She was probably not thinking. She had no idea she was speaking to somebody who gets eleven Sundays in nine years.

You are not somebody who was turned down. You are somebody who asked once, six years ago, of a person who did not know what they were holding. Isaiah 41:10 says He upholds with the right hand of His righteousness, and the Holy Spirit was in that parking lot at seven twenty doing what no service had been scheduled to do.

And here is the practical part, and I am going to be brief and then stop, because I do not know your city or your ward or who is on your unit.

Find one person and ask them directly, and ask them on a weekday, and ask them for a weekday. Not a service. Not a Sunday. One person, one conversation, one question about whether a thing could be done on a Tuesday.

That is where I stop, warmly, because anybody writing to you from a distance who tells you which building to walk into is guessing with your life.

You are not in a category and your week does not have jurisdiction. The word says He upholds and helps and strengthens, three verbs in one sentence, and the Spirit is the seal on it, and none of the three has ever once been scheduled against a schedule on a wall.